Imaginary Places

Cape Cod is loaded with imaginary towns. These are technically old villages that are a part of actual towns that no one wants to list, apparently, as their home town. There are seven such villages in the Town of Barnstable, five in Dennis and three in Yarmouth.

People say they are from Dennisport or Marston Mills or Osterville or South Yarmouth. Post Offices and old churches and, here on the Cape, public library branches have contributed to this illusion.

Names are part of the problem. Within the Town of Barnstable, the political seat of Barnstable County, lies the Village of Barnstable. So if you say you are from Barnstable you mean the village, not the town. No one is apparently from the Town of Barnstable. You are from Centerville, Osterville, Marston Mills, Hyannis, Cotuit, Barnstable or West Barnstable. The Village of Barnstable includes the even smaller Village of Cummaquid. The Village of Centerville includes the even smaller Village of Craigville. The Village of South Yarmouth includes the even smaller Village of Bass River.

Soon most of these village post offices will be closed and the churches, with falling attendance, will be consolidated. Branch libraries have been closed everywhere else in the world in favor of modern central libraries.We do, after all, have automobiles and buses to reach distant places outside our immediate village.

An interesting side effect of this Balkanization is that when the Town of Yarmouth, or any of these actual Towns for that matter, wants to do anything, if that thing will affect South Yarmouth, for example, positively, everyone in West Yarmouth and Yarmouthport will vote against it. If the thing the Town is proposing would negatively affect Yarmouthport, everyone in West Yarmouth and South Yarmouth would vote for it.

We are nothing if not parochial here.